Web 1.0 (Parvaneh Moradi)
'Web 1.0' How Web 1.0 Started: Originally, "Web 1.0" started in 1989 as a broadcast medium for graphical academic documents, and it quickly diverged from there. The web caught fire as a forum for free public broadcasting. Web readership grew exponentially during the Clinton administration, because starting in 1990, American news hyped the World Wide Web as "The Information Superhighway". Millions of Americans, and then the rest of the world, jumped on Web 1.0 as the modern way to receive. Information about the world. Web 1.0 continued its outrageous growth pattern until 2001, when, suddenly, the "Dot Com bubble burst". It burst because many internet startup companies could not live up to the multimillion-dollar expectations of profit. Thousands of people lost their jobs as investors discovered that web users were reluctant to move their consumer spending onto the internet. People just didn't trust the web enough to do big spending online, and many dot com companies had to close down accordingly. The frantic web growth suddenly slowed. Web 1.0 just got itself a big black eye, and was about to suffer an economic hangover from 2001 to 2004. The original frantic investor base left the digital world, and Web 1.0 settled into being a brochure-based broadcast medium that focused more on information than on software services. Years ago however, the screen scene was much different. When I first logged on as a spunky teen, the internet had already outgrown its infancy. Due to barriers-to-entry, the bulk of net users before my time were also programmers, and as such the web was mostly aimed at discussing itself. Well, that and nethack, of course. But things changed. In the mid 1990's, around the time a giant Windows 95 banner could be seen hanging from Toronto's CN Tower, and the Empire State Building was pimping Microsoft colours, a new generation of nerds began to rise. For the first time in history, a relatively tech-naive teen could dial-up and surf the web, provided their parents weren't trying to use the phone. And so, the landscape of the internet was free to be shaped by a surge of new tenants. Sure, the original nerds remained; and for them there was of porn, ultima, and some irresistible dot-com promises. But for the youth, the internet was a fresh, empty canvas. An opportunity to create, produce and publish. It was a way to reach out and touch the world in a way which had been previously out of reach to anyone that wasn't a Beverly Hills 90210 cast member. The world wasn't ours, but the web would be. But bandwidth was still at a premium, and thus the kids of the 90's were left with no choice but to fill the internet with words. Walls of text would span ill-coloured home pages. Chat rooms were ruled by speed-reading authors, and if somebody wanted to "like" something, they would have to explain why. The internet back then was a schizophrenic novel being written chaotically and simultaneously by a committee of anonymous geeks at about 40 words per minute. Sure, it wasn't all Shakespeare. This was the time such phrases as "u r" and "lol" and even the dreaded "omgroflmao" became solidified into our unsuspecting culture. Still, there was something appetizing about the internet's new-found adolescence. Maybe it was the fact that the web was still very empty, and with that emptiness came a natural urge to fill the void. But the audience was very niche, and still completely decentralized. What resulted was a bonanza of some of the purest and most honest forms of writing that man has ever seen. It was unprovoked and unedited; aimless and defenseless. Not all of it was grammatical, most of it was nonsensical, and at least some of it was Klingon. Nonetheless, a generation that had relied so heavily on televisions and telephones were now barfing all their pent-up ideas in text-form, and with no other framework than some shoddy html.